Ballet is so — right now

Written by: Sam Fox on July 27, 2012

We made some new badges… because ballet is so exciting right now. For those of you who didn’t study ballet history, the form’s first patron and self made star was Louis the XIV aka the Sun King. His total decadence was the climax of the baroque and pretty much led to the starving masses who enacted the first installment of French Revolution – storming the Bastille, guillotines etc. So ballet has an interesting, very direct connection to oligarchy, heirarchy, oppression at the hands of the elite. And these connections do persist in most forms of the arts… but in ballet there is a beautiful tension between the corps and the prima.

It’s hard to know where to post this. Our new project – Wikileaks the Ballet is exploring the resurgence and importance of narratives. It’s pretty clear that (after being presumed dead by a large portion of culture & society for about 20 years) struggle is back, and thus, the possibility of narrative is revived. So where abstraction in dance has been king: from techno-scifi-broken-body-architectural-aesthetics, to soft-edged-visceral-image-based-dance-theatre and anything my myopic internet-limited experience of dance has missed, now narrative is making a challenge. But not with too much information. Not documentary performance. Because info is too available and we don’t need to be learning in performance.

Narrative, emo-tion, passion, even melodrama. These things, so long the hallmarks of the incredibly bad “we are way too smart for that” category, deployed with the full arsenal of postmodern toolbox will be the vogue. And not in a cheap fashion way, in a, we are human and are going to fight, love, maybe get bashed in the streets like an Egyptian woman standing with her sisters kind of way. There is a romance for sure. But, if we are smart, the romance will be undercut by the long slow sober encounter with all the questions that will remain unresolved like the never ending, never fully achieved perpetual revolution… The 3D narrative. And the ballet will be stories of the corps… not the primas.

And other people are excited bout this too… imagery, articles below… evidence. evidence.

This is ballet.

and this is an article bout popular dance movies and revolution…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brett-berk/step-up-4_b_1706336.html

and this should be ballet cos its so good. (courtesy of imaginaryparty.tumblr.com)